


A Bird in Hand

by themantlingdark



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 20:32:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16899420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: Frigga tricks her estranged sons into spending Christmas together.





	A Bird in Hand

His dermatologist never listened to him, though by now she must have known he was right. At the beginning of every visit, he reminded her that the muscles over his right eyebrow needed a higher dose of Botox than those in the rest of his face. And, every time, she said, “We’ll see,” and injected equal amounts into each half of his forehead. And, every time, he had to schedule a second appointment to have her shoot another drop of the toxin into his face so that his right eyebrow would lie flat like his left.

Today’s appointment had been no different.

It would have been less irritating if it hadn’t been the end of December. Doctor Taylor had taken off for the holiday now. He couldn’t get in to see her again until after the new year. He was stuck with his rogue eyebrow for two weeks. He consoled himself with the thought that he’d be spending most of that time house-sitting for his parents. Ghost was the only one who’d see his crooked face, and her favorite pastimes included vomiting on the foot of the bed at four in the morning, adhering white fur to dark clothes, shitting in flower pots, and settling in to sleep on your lap just as you realized you desperately needed to piss. His face wouldn’t interfere with any of that.

The flight was crowded and dull, all indifferent elbows and crying infants. Heavy cloud cover hid the miniature toy world out the window soon after takeoff. He couldn’t tell which state he was in. Didn’t know whether he’d hit land or water if he dropped like a stone.

He plugged his earbuds into his phone and got distracted by his rapidly chapping hands. He could feel the skin on his knuckles scuffing further as he rummaged through his satchel to find a bottle thick cream. When found, he spent a full minute methodically rubbing it into his hands, hoping to keep them from cracking any further in the parched cabin air (people didn’t like to buy beauty products from men who looked like Brahmin handbags). He let his music drown out the conversations that weren’t meant for him while his eyes bounced over the bubbling shapes of the smoky clouds out the cabin window.

Halfway through the flight, the plane jolted and dipped through a patch of turbulence. It had always been one of his favorite aspects of air travel. The way it thrilled and tickled his belly like a fairground ride. And it was a moment so full of potential, like a path diverging. It could be a bump in the road or the end of breathing.

He waited for more dips and bobs but the wild pocket of atmosphere was a small one and the plane went stagnant again once it was through.

His mother’s car was waiting in the airport lot. She had left it for him yesterday when she and Odin flew out to spend the holiday stargazing at Death Valley National Park. Loki made a note of where she had the seat so that he could put it back properly for his departure and her return.

Driving through snow was like a combination of piloting a boat and sledding. It had the former’s delay between action and effect and the latter’s lack of friction. People had wrinkled their noses when he told them he was looking forward to it. They were probably the sort of people who made unhappy sounds when their planes passed through turbulence. The people who found comfort in stasis and certainty.

He took the hilly roads that hadn’t yet been plowed, grinding his way up and then gliding down, fishtailing at the corners and sending slush flying up behind him, until the only street left in front of him was the one he grew up on. Rows of ample brick Colonials stood shoulder to shoulder around strict square blocks. The sort of neighborhood where the zip code was worth more than the house cost to make.

When he pulled into the garage and climbed out of the car, he heard the buzz of the dim yellow ceiling light. The sound spoke of late summer night homecomings after weekend road trips and of the amber husks of desiccated insects. Loki could smell old wood, motor oil, and the grass that was still stuck to the lawnmower’s wheels. If it hadn’t been for his coat and the cold, he could have closed his eyes and believed it was August.

He didn’t hear the cat calling from within the house and his heart beat faster, fearing that he’d open the door and find her lying dead in the bay window that looked out onto the birdfeeders. But she was there on the welcome mat when he went inside, purring and getting underfoot. She followed him through the house to the front door, where he leaned out to snatch the mail and to plug in the outdoor Christmas lights.

None of the indoor decorations were hung. His mother usually put them up the day after Thanksgiving. But he hadn’t come home for Christmas--or any other occasion--for the past four years to know if that was still the case. Perhaps she had thought he wouldn’t want them. He had expected them. It hadn’t even occurred to him that there was an alternative. No stockings. No tinsel. No tree. He was entirely unprepared for the loss he felt at their absence. Without marking the holidays, time had felt like one unbroken stretch for him. 

He put on his mother’s hat and his father’s boots and went out to shovel the walk and the driveway. He was the right size for the shovel now. It moved easily over the concrete, filling the neighborhood with its hollow scraping sound. Lights appeared in windows and over doorsteps as darkness descended. He could no longer guess who was flipping the switches. Didn’t know who had moved out and who had moved in. Who had died. Who was too ill to be up. Some houses remained dark and he guessed their occupants had left for the holidays. Other homes had extra cars filling their driveways and spilling out onto the street in front of them. But he didn’t recognize them. They could have been the same neighbors with new cars or new neighbors with old ones.

Even his parents’ house looked different to him these days, and not just because the front door had been painted a different color. It looked like any house now, where once it was so firmly his home.

The creak of the floorboards under his feet seemed louder when there were no human ears but his own to hear it. There were no other noises in the house to distract from the sounds. No soft bodies to absorb and redirect the waves. When he tromped up the steps, the thudding didn’t announce his whereabouts to a brother or a mother. The cat was the only one to catch his footsteps now as she thumped up beside him.

He pulled harder than he needed to on his dresser drawers. The muscle memory in his arms anticipated the weight of clothes, but the drawers were empty of everything but their plaid paper liners. The air inside them smelled like wood now, where once it had been cotton, laundry detergent, and his own stubborn skin.

He unpacked his trousers and sweaters and put them away. The cat climbed in to sleep on top of the cashmere so he left the drawer hanging open for her.

On the fridge he found a note in his mother’s fluid hand telling him that the small tom turkey within was for him and that it would be thawed by the twenty-fourth and had to be cooked or frozen again by the twenty-sixth.

When he opened the cupboard to get a cup for ice water he saw the wine glasses standing upside down in formation: three rows of three, and one row of two. The twelfth he had shattered. His brother had come in late at night four years ago. Three in the morning on the first of January. Nervous, but grinning. He’d met a girl at a Holiday party the week before and had spent every spare minute with her afterward. He’d said he wanted to move to London with her.

Loki remembered screaming something about that woman, and something else about days in the face of decades. He’d pitched the glass at Thor, but the throw had been wide and the crystal had shattered against the refrigerator. It had sent splinters into Thor’s left side though. Thor had asked him to stay and talk; Loki had gone upstairs without another word, then packed up and left later that same morning. All Loki knew now was that he didn’t want to know anything. Any fact he learned about his brother would chip away at what Thor could be and pin him to a was. If he knew nothing about Thor, then Thor was completely limitless. Loki was doing his damnedest to leave it all open. He’d deleted Twitter, Instagram, and facebook. He hadn’t called Thor or even texted him. Hadn’t read or answered the texts that were sent. Had shut down every one of his mother’s attempts to broach the subject of his falling out with his sibling. He hoped never to hear the words “You brother is engaged,” or “Your brother is sick,” or “Your brother was in a car accident on the expressway.” Loki was hoping to keep “Thor is in love with you and healthy and possibly immortal” on the table until his own heart ceased to beat.

Loki made grilled cheese and tomato soup for his supper. Ghost sat in front of him on the table and watched him eat it. He rewarded her determination with a pinch of sandwich.

After dinner, he curled up on the sofa with the cat and channel surfed until his eyes hurt. When he switched off the television, the house went dark and empty again, expanding around him to its full reach. The cozy little island of human life and light and noise that the living room had been vanished when he clicked the remote. He was left in the dim beams of blue starlight and the orange glow of streetlamps that came in through the windows. Some of that light had traveled more than twenty-five trillion miles only to meet the dull, snuffing silence of curtains, rugs, and wallpaper. Loki was the only witness to its end. It struck him as a lovely waste.

The shower left Loki out of sorts where it was normally the highlight of his day. The diffuse light, steamy warmth, and drumming water were not enough to soothe him. They weren’t erasing the rest of the world as he had relied on them to do for the last four years. He was acutely aware of being a tiny animal in a tiled stall in a small room in a house on a block in a neighborhood in a city in a county in a state in a country on a continent on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in a universe. To have to know all of that while simultaneously being unable to hear the cat’s purring over the hiss of the spray left him feeling hopelessly feeble. Useless. He was wet, naked, and helpless in someone else’s home. No one else knew exactly where he was at that moment, or what he was doing, or where he would be next. If he slipped and broke his neck he wouldn’t be found until after the new year. There wasn’t enough food in the cat’s dish to last her that long.

The clock on his bedside table told him that only ten minutes had passed since he’d gone down the hall to wash. He would have bet money it had been twenty. He’d been dawdling, or so he thought. He went back downstairs to heap kibble into Ghost’s bowl and fill her water to the brim, then headed up again and got straight into bed before his skin cooled off completely.

He was half dreaming, half waiting to fall asleep when there was soft, rapid knocking on his door. He had shut it out of habit, the way he always had when he was young, needing privacy back then. Now the cat was crying and standing up on her hind legs, pawing at the door, begging to be let in. He waited to see if she’d give up, not wanting to get out of the warm bed. Ghost paused thirty seconds and, just as Loki was letting himself relax, started knocking and yowling again. He cursed and threw off the blankets to get up and let her in. When he was settled, she curled warmly at his left hip and lulled him with her purring, which he accepted as her apology.

 

When he opened his eyes, the sight was not the one he was accustomed to seeing. The paint on the walls was the wrong color. The ceiling the wrong height. The light source was over his head instead of to his right. The bed was too small. It only took a second to remember he was in his childhood room, but somehow a second felt like far too long. Ghost was on his right now, sleeping on the side of the bed that was closer to the door.

The furnace was off for the moment and the house was still and quiet, as if it were holding its breath. He could hear the occasional crunching roar of a car crawling down the street. Someone was calling their dog back in from the yard. There was the tiny tapping rattle of snowflakes being blown against the windowpane. The wind was moaning as it hit the house and got thrown off its course.

Out the window everything was whited out by snow. The storm clouds were so dense he couldn’t guess at the direction of the sun or the hour of the day. It could have been thirty or twenty or ten degrees outside. 

Ghost made a sudden purring chirp and launched herself off the bed. She tapped her way down the stairs with machine gun footsteps, leaving Loki to lie there giggling at the haste of a house cat. Some nights she would gallop through the house, yodeling, leaping on and off the furniture and skidding across the floors, leaving pale streaks on the wood with her claws. Chasing demons had been Thor’s diagnosis the first time she’d done it, and the thought had stuck with the household. Loki wondered if she had done it last night and he’d slept through it.

He heard two cars coming from opposite ends of the street, then the hum of engines without the low roar of the wheels. Muffled voices. Two people pulled up alongside each other, talking as their paths crossed. The cat was chirping downstairs as if she expected breakfast. Her bowl was full, so Loki wasn’t motivated to move. The cars outside parted ways. One slowly faded to silence while the other came closer and then went quiet as the driver killed the engine. There was the muffled, springy clunk of a car door shutting, and the crunch of footsteps, and then all other sounds were drowned beneath the cat’s singing.

Loki lifted his voice to call her a jackass and ask her what the trouble was. He knew she had food. She paused for a beat and then resumed her song. He bounced on the mattress with his laughter and wondered whether his voice carried half as well as hers.

He stopped laughing when the lock clicked and the bolt slid back in the front door. The air in the house shifted as someone opened it and stepped inside. The air in Loki’s lungs remained still. He picked up his phone and then looked around the room for anything that might qualify as a blunt object. He came up empty-handed.

He heard a voice and wondered how many people were downstairs. Did thieves operate in broad daylight? Perhaps this time of year they did. Everyone was traveling or having guests. No one would notice one more unfamiliar car or two more unfamiliar faces. Then again, it might just be his parents down there. Perhaps they had planned to surprise him.

He picked his way around the creaky floorboards and strained his ears to hear over his own panic. It took a moment to make any sense of what was being said. It was all strangely muffled. And it was all strange.

“Oh no, what’s the matter? World ending? There’s still plenty. You’re fine. Shhhhh. Just wait. Let me take my boots off first. Ow. Stop it. Ow! Cut it out, fucker! Where’s that weird purple thing you love? Go shred that instead.”

Loki tiptoed to the top of the stairs, crouching all the while, then carefully peeked up over the edge of the second floor.

There was a black duffel bag on the floor just inside the front door. Beside it, a lone man in a white knit cap and a red puffer coat was bent in half, trying to unlace his boots while Ghost scrabbled for the laces and snagged his gloves with her nails. The man stepped out of his shoes, scooped up the cat, and straightened. Loki could see him kneading Ghost's neck and pressing his forehead against hers.

“Troll,” Thor laughed affectionately, then kissed the cat and set her on the kitchen counter while he took off his coat, scarf, and cap, all of which had been collaborating to hide his hair. It was still the same length and cut as Loki’s, as though they had coordinated it. It had been up at their chins the last time they’d met; now it was down below their collarbones. The wavy blond curtain hid the sides of Thor’s neck, making it look narrower, which made his double chin all the more unexpected. It was the only baby fat left on him. Every time Loki saw it, he wanted to curl his finger under Thor’s jaw and stroke it. It reminded him of Ghost’s pudgy pink tummy.

Loki was halfway down the stairs before Thor saw him. He watched Thor’s face: first stiff and startled at seeing someone else in the house, then wide with surprise that curved up into delight.

“She didn’t tell me you were coming,” Thor said, and started toward the stairs with long, swift strides.

“She didn’t tell me you were coming either,” Loki admitted, and he watched closely for disappointment on Thor’s face, but if it was ever there, he must have blinked.

“As long as she’s keeping secrets from both of us,” Thor grinned, and reached for Loki as they met at the bottom of the steps.

Thor locked his arms behind Loki’s back and pulled him in tight, pinning him against his breast. He kissed Loki on the ear, on the side of the cheek, and on the mouth, then hummed and reversed for three more kisses. Firm presses with full lips, fully puckered. Loki supposed Thor’s mouth had been pressed to his skin for two seconds all told. The seconds had passed slowly. But not slowly enough.

Thor squeezed Loki and swayed with him, then leaned his head back on his neck but didn’t loosen his arms. He was just smiling softly at Loki now, looking his face over, then smiling more brightly. The white rows of teeth reflected light palpably to Loki’s recently sleeping eyes.

“Should we put up the tree and everything?” Thor asked, turning his head toward the corner of the room that would normally have been aglow with strings of lights. Loki instantly answered in the affirmative. “I’ll start bringing up the boxes.”

“I’ll... get dressed,” Loki laughed, looking down at his rumpled pajamas, “and then I’ll be right down.”  

They both smiled and nodded once in mock solemnity, then patted each other’s backs before they let go and turned away.

When Loki caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror he was smiling as widely as his paralysed facial muscles could manage. His cheeks were flushed. His right eyebrow was raised at least half an inch higher than his left one. He also had dry drool crusted at the edges of his mouth and amber clumps of sleep in the corners of his eyes.

“Damn.”

They moved the living room furniture and assembled the Christmas tree that their grandfather had built from fallen branches, driftwood, and antlers. Then they unpacked the other decorations. Ghost hid in each cardboard box as it was emptied and batted crumpled balls of newspaper across the floor until they were trapped under furniture. The brothers laid the embroidered cloth their grandmother made on the dining table and put the runner their mother wove down the center. Put bows on the backs of the chairs. An hour was spent untangling strands of tiny multicolored lights while the cat swiped at the wires unhelpfully.

“Congratulations,” Thor said, as they gingerly draped a long strand of blown glass garland on the tree. “I saw your whole line on all the best of the year lists.”

“Thanks. Yeah,” Loki admitted. “Demand shot up. Now I just make decisions and shmooze all day while my little army of employees does the rest.”

Thor made a breathy sound of recognition, half laugh, half gasp. “It turned into a desk job.”

“Yep,” Loki confirmed, with a comical grimace. “It’s exactly what I wanted to avoid.”

They groaned and shook their heads, then stepped back a bit to consider their handiwork.

“It looks...” Loki began, narrowing his eyes and twisting his mouth.

“Sparse,” Thor finished, after glancing over and catching the underwhelmed expression on his brother’s face. Loki hummed his agreement. “She had me put a lot of the lights outside on the hedges this year. Normally we do the mantle and the banister.”

Loki hummed and wrinkled his nose at the dim spots in the house.

“Wanna go get more?” Thor asked, and Loki nodded. “Do you want mashed potatoes and green beans and stuffing and pie and everything with the turkey?”

“Definitely.”

“We’ll go to the grocery store too, then.”

Thor poked through the fridge and cupboards to take inventory of ingredients and compile a shopping list. When that was done, they bundled up in and went out to Thor’s truck. There was only one brush, so Loki sat in the relative warmth the passenger seat while Thor swept away the thin sheet of snow that had collected on the car. When Thor climbed into the cabin and closed the door, the sudden stillness in the car made the world beyond the windshield seem muted. Almost false. Like images on a screen. The tree branches swayed in silent wind until the engine flooded the foreground when Thor turned the key. Loki’s seat was pushed forward slightly as Thor braced his arm behind it and twisted to look out the rear window. Loki twisted in turn and leaned to his left to look behind them too. The whole world seemed to shift around them as they backed down to the end of the driveway.  

“Clear on the left,” Loki said, and Thor swung them out onto the road. Their bodies moved straight with momentum as the car turned left around them.

The blanket of white over everything made all the homes look tucked in and sleepy though it was nearly three o’clock. Dogs and cats dozed on the backs of the sofas that sat in front windows. The twinkle of lit Christmas trees in living rooms peeked through window lattice and lace curtains. Handmade wreaths hung from doors. Over-size ornaments swung from the branches of maples and birches.

Thor brought Loki up to date on who lived where now and how they were doing. The neighborhood slowly filled up again with names that Loki knew.

The main roads had been plowed and salted so there were no thrills to be had in navigating them. Loki stared out the window to learn which businesses had closed or moved and which ones had remained or opened. Some buildings had been remodeled or repainted. Others were missing entirely.

“Is it for headaches?” Thor asked.

“What?”

“The Botox,” Thor clarified. “Is it to release the tension in your facial muscles so you don’t get migraines?”

“Oh. No. It’s for business.”

“You’re not afraid of being accused of false advertising?”

“No. My stuff works,” Loki said, removing a glove and holding his left hand under Thor’s chin as they parked in front of the hardware store. Thor took off his gloves and took Loki’s hand, tilting it toward his face and straightening Loki’s fingers before stroking the smooth skin.  

Loki leaned over for a closer look at Thor’s hands, which felt softer than his own where they held his wrist and brushed his knuckles.

“Have you been using my creams?” Loki asked.

“No, not yet. This is from all the massage oil,” Thor admitted.

Loki leaned in still closer to get a better look.

He found taut, smooth skin. The same very short, carefully filed fingernails his own hands sported. The color pale with winter. The lack of a ring on the fourth finger--though Loki knew that didn’t guarantee anything, it was nevertheless a comfort, as it allowed him to be pleased for his own sake and disappointed in everyone who had failed to sufficiently appreciate his brother.

“I should probably start using your stuff on my face,” Thor said, and drew his fingertips over his crow’s feet and his laugh lines before putting his gloves back on. “I don’t get massage oil up here all day to help me.”

“You don’t need help. You’re aging like good wine and David Bowie,” Loki sighed, shaking his head and turning to open the door, hoping to hide his smile and the color that had risen up into his cheeks. They climbed out of the car and pulled their arms tight to their sides against the cold. “The Botox isn’t for that part of the job,” Loki explained. “It’s for the poker face. Helpful in negotiations… and all human interactions, really.”

“But you literally put poison in your face,” Thor said. His voice was high with his amusement.

“I literally paid someone a lot of money to put poison in my face,” Loki corrected.

Thor laughed and butted their shoulders together. Snow caught in their hair as they walked through the lot. It melted when they stepped inside, leaving wet dots that glittered under the store’s fluorescent lights. Thor said hello to a clerk. From this angle Thor couldn’t possibly have read a name tag. Loki didn’t recognize anyone anymore.

They grabbed Christmas lights in red, green, gold, and white. Thor picked up a couple bags of sand, some white paper lunch sacks, and box of a hundred tea lights.

The wind was in their faces on the walk to the car. The snowflakes’ kisses stung their cheeks, but then politely soothed them with their melting.

“Has the house needed a lot of work?” Loki asked, as they pulled out of the parking lot and bounced back onto the road.

“Just small stuff,” Thor shrugged. “New covers for the basement window wells. Caulk for the bathtub. Boards for the steps on the deck. That sort of thing.”

“Does it feel different to you there now?”

“Yeah,” Thor answered instantly. His voice was low and breathy, relieved and conspiratorial. “It feels the way Gramma and Grampa’s house felt. I still know every inch of it, but it isn’t mine anymore, and I always feel a little like I’m intruding.”

“Exactly,” Loki said, sighing the word in relief. It fogged the window and blurred his view of someone’s molded plastic Nativity set. “Is Mom doing as well as she says she is?” he asked, whispering as though she could hear. “She always seems all right when she comes to see me.”

“She is,” Thor confirmed. “I wish she’d retire though. The bending and twisting are hell on her back and neck.”

“Well, don’t hold your breath. Wild horses couldn’t drag her away from that job. It’s just boobs and babies all day.”

“When you put it that way,” Thor smiled.

“Do you do still do massage therapy for her?”

“Yeah, and she keeps needing it more and more. Used to take an hour to get all the knots out of her. Now it takes two.”

Loki recognized a cashier at the grocery checkouts on the way into the store. The world seemed to gain some footing by the familiarity. Loki was unexpectedly excited to find a face he could recall from childhood beyond the walls of his parents’ home. The clerk smiled and inclined her head when she saw them and he and Thor smiled and waved in return.

The candy aisle was closest to the entrance and Thor pushed the cart straight for it. Loki was pleased that Thor didn’t even consider passing it up or putting it off until they were on their way out.

“Priorities,” Loki approved.

Thor pulled into Los Amigos on their way back to the house and Loki grunted out a low sound that was part moan, part laugh, and all pleasure. He’d been relieved to see it was still open when they’d passed it earlier.

“Carry out?” Thor asked.

“Yeah, then we can eat on the couch in our pajamas.”

“Half a dozen enchiladas?”

“And a burrito and a quesadilla. And a couple sides of guacamole.”

Loki took one of the padded vinyl seats near the cash register while Thor placed their order and paid.

It was only four thirty. The dinner rush hadn’t begun and the restaurant was quiet. Little had changed since the first time they had come to it in the nineties. A coat of paint, fresh upholstery for the booths, and new carpet perhaps, but all in colors and patterns that closely resembled what had come before.

Thor dropped a few bills into the tip jar and took his coins to the vending machines. He bought two temporary tattoos and then dropped down into the seat beside his brother.

“Do you want the heart with the ‘Mom’ banner, or the clover with the Celtic... ish knots?”

“The ‘Mom’ one,” Loki answered, holding out his hand.

“Merry Christmas,” Thor said, and set the curled plastic sheet in Loki’s waiting palm.

Loki smiled softly as he admired his present. “We should put them on our foreheads. Put a little red lipstick around the lines and rub it in so they look like fresh tattoos. Spritz ourselves with water so we look sweaty-drunk. Then send selfies to Mom.”

“She knows you’d never get a tattoo anywhere, let alone your face,” Thor said, shaking his head. “We should send those selfies to Dad.”

They stared out through the glass vestibule doors and saw the snow slowly coating Thor’s windshield, then being blown away by gusts of wind. Voices rose and fell behind them as the kitchen doors opened and closed. The quiet was comfortable. A rest. Loki felt that rare pleasure of knowing what was coming and knowing that it would be good. He and Thor were leaning toward each other slightly in their chairs. There was a faint pressure along their arms and shoulders where the down in Thor’s coat was compressed between their bodies. It made Loki think of arches made from angled blocks of stone.

After dinner Thor made a Christmas playlist while Loki poured wine. Loki couldn’t distinguish which glass was the one he last saw Thor drink from, he only knew that none of them could be the one he had thrown. He filled their cups almost to the brim with red and wondered about the cut in Thor’s side. Whether it had needed stitches or if a butterfly bandage had been enough.

They passed strings of lights back and forth between the uprights that lined the staircase and then wound another strand side to side up the chimney, using the hooks that were screwed into the walls thirty years ago for that purpose and were now thick with white paint.

When they were satisfied with their work, they stood in front of the glowing tree for a photo. Thor put his arm around Loki’s shoulders and they pressed the sides of their faces together as Thor reached out with his phone to take the picture. He sent the shot to their mother to let her know what had become of her surprise.

Thor went to the basement to clean the cat’s litter box. That fulfilled the last of the day’s duties and the brothers then sat on the sofa, listening to music and letting their limbs go heavy with more wine.

Loki felt warm and slow. Strangely restrained by his own weight. The sweat gathering on his upper lip was the sole cool spot on his body. His mouth was the only part of him that still felt light enough to move.

“Where’s Jane?” he said, and thought of Ghost coughing up her hairballs on everybody’s bedspreads.

“London, probably,” Thor said. His voice was airy and soft, as if he was asking.

"'Probably'?”

“She could be with her family,” Thor offered, with a lazy shrug. “Or vacationing.”

“Why didn’t you go to London with her?” Loki whispered.

“You know why.”

There was no strain in Thor’s voice. Loki wondered if that was because Thor was accustomed to being angry with him and had learned to function in that state, or if it was because Thor’s normal state was not being bothered about it. After all this time, surely the latter.

“Why did you disappear?” Thor asked, and Loki puffed out a single breath of brittle laughter.

“You know why.”

Ghost flowed up onto the cushion between them and then climbed onto Thor’s chest. In the low, rosy light from the Christmas tree, Loki could just make out her nails going through the front of Thor’s flannel shirt. Her toes moved in little waves as she kneaded his breast. She purred at him until he scratched her chin.

“Are you still in love with me?” Thor asked.

Loki opened his mouth to protest but only sucked in air. He was glad about the Botox. He knew his right eyebrow was in the stratosphere, but Thor could only see the left side of his face, which was placid thanks to paralysis.

“Are you ever going to exhale?” Thor teased, with maddening calm, still rhythmically scratching the cat. “Is all that still out of bounds?”

“It’s… irrelevant,” Loki offered, when his lungs were once again willing to cooperate.

“Is it?” Thor asked. The same tone of voice he used with Ghost. High and sweet, full of playfulness and amusement. He was barely biting back a smile. Loki wanted to slap him.

“If you think it’s funny to walk in my shoes, you’re welcome to them,” Loki said.

“They wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t fill them with stones.”

“I didn’t choose this.”

“That’s debatable. Actually, yeah, let’s debate it--you’ll lose,” Thor grinned, and leaned in to bump noses with the cat.

“You think this is a joke,” Loki said, not quite a question.

“I think it’s absurd,” Thor sighed, and let his head fall back against the cushions. “Absurd things are usually good for a laugh… in hindsight anyway. Mom might disagree with me, though, she hasn’t been happy about all this.”

“How much does she know?” Loki asked, horrified, finally turning his head to fully look at his brother. He could feel his right eyebrow reaching for his hairline. His eyes were open wide, but the slack brow above the left one weighed the lid down in a way that always made him regret the Botox.

Thor glanced over at him and huffed a laugh.

“I told her we exchanged some words that couldn’t be forgotten and for which no apologies could or should be made. I didn’t say what those words were--or which one of us said them.”

Loki let out a shaky breath and sagged back against the sofa. He thought of Thor’s off-kilter left eye, which never seemed to be looking at you the way his right one did, but always was.

“I said, ‘Don’t go, I need to talk to you,’ and you went off without so much as a goodbye,” Thor murmured. He had switched to stroking the base of Ghost’s back and lightly smacking her rump with motions so swift his hand blurred. It was the closest the cat ever came to getting laid and seemed to provide a satisfactory substitute in her estimation. Loki was fairly certain that was why his brother did it. She was marching in place on Thor’s lap, arching her back and leaning into the blows.

“What was I supposed to say?” Loki asked.

“Anything,” Thor answered, with an amiable tip of his head.

Loki drained the rest of his wine in one long pull and set his glass on the coffee table with a bit too much speed and tilt. The crystal wobbled until Thor reached over with his leg and pressed the base flat against the tabletop with his toes. He was still spanking the cat.

In the shower, Loki fumbled through his washing as best he could. His mind kept replaying his fight with his brother, just as it had done for months after the thing had happened. Thor’s stricken face. The tears and broken glass. The words coming out unbidden. Loki had taken all his hypotheticals and possibilities and whittled them down to one fixed form in a span of thirty seconds. And without meaning to. He’d shocked them both. Up to that point he’d believed he could live with things as they were. Not happily, perhaps, but passably. He'd believed he’d been capable of settling for his share of Thor. As much as was conventionally acceptable. Thor had always been much more affectionate than most people were with their loved ones, so Loki had felt he’d been getting a better bargain than could ordinarily be expected. He had always known siblings moved away from home, and, given Thor’s disposition, he had warned himself it was a likelihood. But then Thor was there, all bright-eyed and blushing and about to leave--with Jane. She had so recently been a stranger, but was already the end that justified all means. She was about to possess all the things that Loki had firmly and frequently told himself would never actually belong to him, at which point he realized he had nevertheless believed them to be irrevocably his own. Everything, carried off across a cold ocean. That Thor might leave him behind had been about to move from theory into practice. From could to would. Loki had decided that if Thor could leave, then so could he.

Loki shut his bedroom door behind him, took two steps, remembered Ghost’s lesson from the night before, and turned back to open the door for her. The sounds of Thor washing the dishes drifted up from the kitchen. Loki pictured him with his feet splayed and his hips flush with the counter as he stood at the sink. Sometimes Thor spoke to the cat with his voice pitched high and soft for her, but his words were lost to the rugs and walls and the splash of running water. Absorbed and extinguished like the starlight. Another lovely waste. Lovelier. Loki couldn’t work out whether the words they had never said to each other were lost too, or if they were still waiting on their tongues. And, if they were still there, could they really matter four years after the fact?

Half an hour later, he heard Thor’s footsteps on the stairs. Then the hiss of the shower running. The floorboards creaking in the hall. And finally the quiet. All signs of Thor vanished as the walls muffled the rustle of blankets and blocked the soft squeak of the springs in the mattress. It felt like Thor had ceased to exist at the threshold of his old room. He could have been standing there still, beneath the door frame. Or he could have been in bed--on his back, or on his side, or on his belly. Or standing at the window, staring out at the sleeping street with the cat cradled in his arms. Or sitting at the desk, texting someone or reading. Without looking, Loki couldn’t know.

Loki wondered how parents could bear it. To have their babies only maybe breathing in the room down the hall. If you were lying in bed beside someone, you could be sure. There were so many things Loki was unsure of beyond whether or not Thor was breathing. Was he happy? Heartbroken? Angry? Was he all three at once, or did they alternate? Did his mouth taste salty or sweet? Did he linger in bed when there was someone there with him, or hop up at the first light of morning? Did his toes stay warm the way his fingers did? Did he like to be petted and held? Did his eyes still look blue in the dark? Was there anything he wouldn’t give, or do to, or tell you? And would it ever be possible for Loki to be certain of any of those things? Or was Thor indifferent to him now and only being polite? Was Thor's kindness a sign that he no longer cared? Was he merely granting Loki the same courtesy he showed to strangers?

Loki thought about walking down the hall to Thor’s room. He could be sure of the breathing at least. With any luck, he’d be able to hear it at a distance and there would be no need to lean over the bed and risk getting caught and having to answer questions. But, no, Loki thought. I’m not lucky.

Loki woke at three in the morning to the kuh-aah kuh-aah kuh-aah of the cat throwing up. He sat up and reached toward his toes, groping for her hunched body at the foot of the bed, hoping to catch her and hold her over the edge to puke on the hardwood where it was easier to clean. His hands found nothing but air. Eventually his mind perked up enough to tell him that she wasn’t with him.

He heard Thor’s voice coming through the wall: “Nononononono kitty!” and then, “Goddammit, Ghost,” as the kuh-ahh stopped churning and ended in a long, wet hwaaaaaaaaahhk.

When Loki went out into the hall he found Thor emerging from his former bedroom with his arms full of blankets.

“Bad?” Loki asked.

“Ridiculous. If my legs hadn’t been there to prop up the sheets, it would’ve soaked into the mattress. She must have had a pint of water and a pound of hair in her.”

“She’s such a perfect asshole,” Loki laughed, flipping on the lights so that they wouldn't be trudging down the stairs in the dark. “She has it down to a science.”

“She took a dump in the ficus while you were showering,” Thor remembered. “Right in front of me. Made eye contact with me the whole time and then watched while I cleaned it up. I swear her life is just one long troll.”

“It is. She’s objectively the worst cat.”

“I know,” Thor laughed. “I hope she lives forever.”

They headed down to the laundry room in the basement with its calming scents of dampness and detergents. Loki loaded the sheets into the washer while Thor dealt with the mess on the coverlet.

In the front room, Loki pulled the curtains around himself to block the indoor lights as he looked out the window. He could see the snow falling in shimmering waves, buffeted by the wind. The facets of the snowflakes caught the tangerine glare of the streetlight. It looked like an endlessly shattering mirror that reflected a moonrise.

“Have to shovel in the morning,” Loki called. “Your truck is frosted like a cupcake.”

Thor hummed. He had plugged in all the Christmas lights again and was sitting on the couch, staring at the tree. The room was glowing a soft golden pink around him. To Loki, it looked like the colors that composed his brother had been blended together and beamed onto the walls.

“Do you sleep much anymore?” Loki asked softly. He was staring at the back of Thor’s head, hoping to glean something about his brother's mood from his voice before he moved any closer.

“Not the way I did before,” Thor answered, after a beat. He sounded like he hadn’t thought about it until now. He also sounded tired and small, so Loki sat beside him on the sofa and stared with him. “I wake up before seven almost every day now without meaning to.”

Loki nodded. His body slept less and less as well.

“This morning was the latest I’ve slept in since college,” Loki admitted. “Apart from the odd all-nighter or flu.”

“The same thing happens to me whenever I come back. I have to set alarms if I want to accomplish anything when I’m visiting,” Thor confessed. “It’s like my brain knows I don’t work here and finally lets me rest.”

“We always wanted to sleep down here when the Christmas tree was up,” Loki remembered. “They never let us, though.”

“They couldn’t. If they’d allowed it all month, then they would have been flailing around for a reason to keep us from doing it on Christmas Eve.”

“Mmm. Well they can’t stop us now,” Loki noted, and raised his functional eyebrow at his brother.

Thor laughed softly and climbed to his feet.

“Ghost never pukes twice in one night, right?” Loki asked, not sounding overly confident in the half-assumption.

“Right, but she hasn’t christened the sofa-bed yet either, so that might inspire her,” Thor said. He slid the coffee table aside toward the armchair just the same. Loki pulled the cushions off the sofa and handed them over for Thor to stack on the floor. The bed popped out of the base of the couch like a jack-in-the-box. When they had it made up with linens, they climbed under the covers and stretched out with matching sighs.

“I don’t know why, but splitting a queen is still better than having a twin to myself,” Loki said.

“God, I know,” Thor groaned. “There’s something so demoralizing about being in a twin. It isn’t that they’re too small, it’s just that there’s no potential. Like, ‘Sorry, fucker--your ass is sleeping alone until you get a double at least.’”

“Exactly,” Loki laughed. “After I moved out, I slept on the floor until I’d saved up enough for a king.”

“I did the same thing,” Thor nodded.

The washing machine beeped that it was done and Thor sighed a curse and went downstairs to throw everything in the dryer.

When he got back in bed, they listened to the snow blowing against the windowpanes as their hearts slowed and their eyelids grew heavy.

“Do you want to do the turkey tomorrow, or on Christmas day?” Thor asked.

“Tomorrow. Then we can eat leftovers sooner. Less cooking in the long run.”

“Good call.”

Loki could feel time stretching out into dream-pace. His thoughts flitted through his head in seconds that seemed like hours. His foot felt like it missed a step and he jerked awake as his heart jolted in his chest.

“Falling?” Thor said.

“Yeah, sorry. Did I wake you up?”

“No.”

Thor’s voice was still small. It made Loki want to move closer, to hear it without Thor having to raise it. So that the sound could get smaller and softer without getting lost. So that Thor would whisper into the shell of his ear. That way the words would belong only to Loki. They wouldn't go to waste on insensible floors and furniture.

Thor could have pretended to be insensible. Asleep. What did it mean that he hadn't? Was he lonely and longing for conversation? He’d never been much of a talker and that didn’t appear to have changed. Was it insomnia? Or was he simply too polite?

“Do you remember our last Christmas?” Loki asked, staring down past his feet at the glowing tree. “Not the one four years ago. The last one…”

“The last one where we were all still pretending,” Thor finished. “When we knew it was them, and they knew we knew, but none of us actually wanted to say there was no Santa Claus. I think it was my favorite Christmas.”

Loki nodded and felt his pulse speed up, unnerved at hearing Thor say all the things that were in his own head. It was something that had always happened between them before, but the four years spent apart had given Loki an indication of how odd it was.

“They went all-out that year,” Loki remembered. “It looked like an army of elves had been here decorating. The ribbons and wrapping paper were so pretty I almost didn’t want to open anything.”

“I liked it better knowing it was them,” Thor admitted. “No matter what sort of shit we pulled throughout the year, they still spoiled us rotten at Christmas.”

“It was nice to feel forgivable.”

Thor hummed and rolled onto his left side. For a moment, Loki forgot how time and bodies worked and worried that Thor was going to tear open the wound on his flank. Loki drew a quick breath, intending to tell Thor to stay on his back and spare the injury, but then the years came flooding back to him and he let the air out again.

“Did you have to go to the ER for the glass?”

“What? Oh, no,” Thor soothed, almost laughing, as though the idea was implausible. “Just tweezers and a butterfly bandage.”

Loki wondered whether the injury had come to the fore in Thor's mind when it had happened, or if other thoughts had overshadowed it. All the swirling, unspoken words and the secrets that had preceded them.

“Did you think of anything?” Thor asked, and his eyebrows lifted in the center, optimistic and sweet. Youthful to a degree that made Loki nervous. This was not a world for naked hope.

“Anything for what?”

“To say,” Thor replied. “You’ve had four years.”

Loki could see the tops of Thor’s eyelids and the glossy black fans of the lashes as Thor blinked and held his eyes shut for an extra second. Not out of shyness. Grace, maybe. Granting Loki undeserved privacy. A moment in which to collect himself if he needed it.

“I hadn’t meant to say any of it.”

“I gathered. But did you mean what you said?”

“I--” Loki blinked twice in quick succession before he caught himself. He could feel his eyebrow floating up toward his hairline. “--was just stating facts,” he finished.

“Not just,” Thor grinned. His lips were held shut and his eyes were hiding behind his lids and eyelashes again, but his cheeks were climbing high on his face and the creases at the corners of his eyes were deepening. The expression was restrained. Loki guessed it wasn't entirely intentional. So what did it say that warranted hiding? Was it mocking? Gloating? Was it amusement at the memory of the whole mess? Was it embarrassment? Or discomfort? Or-

Thor kissed him, still smiling, but with his eyes open now, watching Loki’s face. Thor’s expression smoothed and then fell as Loki made no motion or sound.  

“Am I too late?” Thor asked.

His lips were still pressed to Loki’s lips as he spoke, and the words shifted Loki’s stunned mouth, warming and waking it. The M made a perfect nip of a kiss when Thor pronounced it.

“No,” Loki answered, shaking his head quickly, but faintly, so that their lips remained flush as he did it.

Thor grinned wider and kissed him again with lips that were tight from smiling.

And the infinite possibilities were exposed for what they really were: nothing in the face of the actual. Three seconds ago Thor’s kisses could have been wet, or soft, or clumsy, or cold. They could have tasted of tears, or toothpaste, or mouthwash, or morning breath. They had boundless potential--and not an ounce of substance. Now Thor’s kisses were warm and firm, laughing and flavorless. Celebratory and urgent, as if making up for lost time.

“When did all this start?” Thor asked, breaking from his kisses to rub the tips of their noses together.

“I don’t know,” Loki sighed. “Probably infancy. I only remember when I recognized it.”

“Which was?” Thor encouraged, knocking his forehead against Loki’s.

“We were... nine and twelve maybe? Riding our bikes on the dirt road behind the high school. I was right beside you and I asked you who your best friend was. You said Sif, instantly,” Loki huffed and Thor held his laughter back behind tight lips. “So I shoved you. It threw us both off balance, of course, and we fell over.”

“Oh god, yeah, your knee and elbow got all fucked up,” Thor remembered, wincing around his smile.

“Yep. And I started freaking out about the dirt and gravel stuck in my skin.”

“You thought it was going to get inside you and that you’d have to have it surgically removed. You were saying all sorts of scary shit.”

“I know,” Loki laughed. “I thought it would slip into my blood vessels and plug them up and kill me like a blood clot.”

“You were such a morbid little shit.”

“You have no idea,” Loki agreed, laughing. “And then you got up and came over. I figured you were going to kick my ass for knocking you down. Instead you just sucked all the filth out of my hideous new holes and spat it into the grass. There was blood dripping out from under your bangs where you’d cut your head open when you hit the ground, but you never mentioned it. Never ratted me out. Chivalrous bastard… Anyway, it was all downhill from there.”

“Uphill, I expect,” Thor said, and then pulled Loki closer.

“Thought I’d learn to ease up a little with time and practice,” Loki said. “Be less greedy with you. Less jealous.”

He felt Thor’s leg sliding between his own and he trapped it there with thighs. The limb was pleasantly warm, firm, and plump. He couldn’t touch his knees together around it.

“You’ve always been the all or nothing sort,” Thor noted, and Loki laughed.

“I think I’ve been mistaking the latter for the former."

Thor nodded faintly and made a small sound of recognition, then flattened his hand over the base of Loki’s back and heaved him even closer.

Loki’s balls pressed against the front of Thor’s thigh. It hoisted them up slightly, which made them impossible to ignore. Thor wiggled his fingers under the band of Loki’s pajama bottoms and petted the upper reaches of the cleft in Loki’s ass. Loki would have been annoyed by the haste of his own erection if it weren’t for the fact that Thor had had one the whole time they’d been pressed together. It was bobbing like clockwork where it was trapped between their hips. Loki wondered when it arrived.

“All right in there?” Thor asked, and quickly dipped his chin to indicate that he wasn’t talking about Loki’s skull.

“I’m kind of pretzeled,” Loki confessed, and Thor leaned back so they could reach down the fronts of their pants to adjust themselves before they settled in again.

“Better?”

“Much,” Loki sighed, sending a pleased jet of air across Thor’s throat.

Loki wondered why he ever worried. Why he wasted all that time treading water that was never over his head to begin with. It was so obvious in hindsight. The boy who sucked mud out of your scraped skin and delivered the cat’s beloved spank-fuckings was never going to be bothered. Was far from indifferent, but was probably impossible to appall as far as these things went.

“Is Mom topless when you do her massage therapy?” Loki asked, and wondered what it seemed to say for his unseen train of thought.

“And bottomless.”

“Is it weird?”

“No, it’s nice.”

Loki hummed and then accidentally fell asleep while Thor kneaded the muscles in his shoulders, back, and bottom.

He woke with a grunt as the cat walked across his slack flank. He heard the same sound puff out of Thor a second later as she treaded on him too. The buzzer for the dryer was going off downstairs and she wanted one of her hairless idiot man-kittens to get up and make the nasty noise go away.

“Subtle, Ghost,” Thor huffed, then disentangled himself from Loki’s limbs and staggered off to the laundry room.

When he came back, he set a tidy stack of folded sheets and pillowcases on the arm of the sofa and then draped the coverlet over the bed. It was still hot from the dryer and Loki moaned as the heat seeped into his skin.

“How the fuck did you fold the fitted sheet?”

Thor shrugged in reply and scrambled under the covers to warm his cold toes against the tops of Loki’s feet. When that was accomplished, they resumed their former entanglement and fell asleep.

It was light when Loki woke. The lemon glow of a clear sky was peeking in around the edges of all the curtains. The cat was loudly crunching kibble at her dish, but the rest of the house was quiet with the fridge and furnace both off for the moment.

Loki stretched and squirmed, which had the desired effect of rousing his brother. He watched Thor’s face carefully, looking for confusion, disgust, regret, or any other sign of awkwardness, but Thor’s features lifted at once with pleasure and he leaned straight in for kisses. After a dozen of those, Thor peeked over the back of the sofa to look at the clock on the microwave.

“What’s the damage?”

“It’s almost eleven,” Thor croaked. “We have to get the turkey in.”

“We have to do the pie and stuffing first.”

“You do the pie and I’ll do the stuffing and trussing. We’re having M&Ms for breakfast.”

In the break that came after putting the turkey in the oven and before baking crescent rolls, they went out to remove the four inches of snowfall from the driveway. They cleared a path down the center and then Loki worked his way toward the house while Thor worked his way toward the road, each of them throwing the snow off onto the lawn at their left. When they were finished, their shovels had left symmetrical tracks on each side of the drive.

“I promised Mom I’d do the candles,” Thor said, once they were back indoors.

“So did I.”

They basted the turkey and then Thor steered Loki back to the sofa bed, where he tipped both of them over to bounce on the mattress in a chorus of complaining springs. They curled up together and pulled the blankets over their heads until their fingers and faces had grown warm again. When Thor kissed the back of Loki’s neck, Loki stiffened.

“Don’t start, we’ll just have to stop again.”

“The turkey won’t be done for two more hours and it won’t take that long to do the potatoes. We have at least an hour-”

“I mean we’ll have to stop altogether. I’ll go back to my life and you’ll go back to yours, only I’ll know even more of what I’m missing and it’ll all be worse. I don’t want pieces and pining and stolen weekends. You said yourself I was the all or nothing sort.”

Loki felt Thor’s irritated snort of breath against his nape. Almost a growl. It was followed by a deep intake of shaky breath.

“I swear to fucking god you’re such a stupid fucking fuck sometimes I can’t stand it. How can you be so fucking clever and so fucking wrong? Just ask for all, you fucking idiot.”

Thor punctuated his hissed torrent with a long bite to Loki’s right trapezius that was registered primarily by Loki’s cock.

The cat, never one to miss out on excitement, hopped wide-eyed and hopeful up onto the mattress. She watched for a few seconds, realized she’d arrived too late, and curled up on the blankets to begin bathing.

“Nice vocab,” Loki said.

“Fuck off.”

“Can you go a day without saying fuck?”

“Can you go a second without fucking up?”

They lay still, breathing slowly, carefully, and consciously until Loki sighed.

“Isn’t it too much to ask? I don’t want to upend our lives.”

“Okay, one, your priorities are garbage, and two, what do you think you’ll be upending? I live two miles from you.”

“What?” Loki whispered.

“You don’t even know my address,” Thor sighed. “Jesus, Loki.”

“But… I’ve never seen you. Mom sees you all the time. I figured you were still here.”

“I’ve never seen you. And I’ve never run into my dentist or my landlord or anyone else I know.”

Loki hadn’t either, now that he thought about it.  

They dozed for an hour and then finished cooking dinner. The cat jumped up onto the counter to help herself to the turkey as it rested before carving. She ripped into a drumstick and began gulping down meat while Thor’s back was turned.

Thor heard the crunching of crispy skin behind him and huffed.

“Goddammit, Ghost, I was gonna give you some as a treat, you little fuckbucket.” Thor clicked his tongue and dragged her away from the bird, setting her on the back of the sofa. She remained there, staring intently at the turkey.

“Think she’ll throw it up?” Loki asked, looking up from setting the table. Thor groaned.

“If she does, she’ll just eat it again. Shit, it’ll be greasy though. Fingers crossed she keeps it down... or has the decency to do it on the concrete floor in the basement.”

“Pretty sure Ghost and decency are mutually exclusive.”

After dinner they set up an assembly line in the garage, folding down the edges of paper lunch sacks, putting an inch of sand in the bottoms of the bags, and setting a tea light in the center of the sand. They loaded the makeshift lanterns into their red Radio Flyer wagon and began edging the sidewalk with lights, plopping the paper sacks down in the snow every three feet along their front yard, then lighting the candles with a tiny torch. All the nearby neighbors seemed to have participated too--or asked others to do it in their inability or absence. Every yard in sight was lined with flickering gold lights. Thor and Loki took pictures for their parents as they did a leisurely lap around the block. Families were out walking with children who are so bundled up in bulky snowsuits that they waddled more than walked.

When they’d done their tour, the brothers headed back inside to apply their temporary tattoos to their foreheads for their father’s benefit.

Ghost spent the entirety of Ernest Scared Stupid stretched out on Thor’s chest, where she purred, got her chin scratched, and poked more holes in his skin.

“How much blood have you lost to her kneading?” Loki asked, looking at his brother from the side of his eye.

“It’s worth a liter if it means she’s digesting that fucking drumstick instead of throwing it up all over the furniture.”

Loki took a shower that was almost military in its speed and precision. He could see Thor’s shadow moving across the shower curtain as Thor got ready for bed. Hear him talking to the cat, asking if she wanted water from the tap and then turning it on for her.

Thor was standing naked at the sink flossing his teeth when Loki pulled the shower curtain aside.

“I can see the holes she put in your chest from here,” Loki winced, squinting at Thor’s front in the mirror. His breast was blotched with pink that was flecked with red. “Flush those out really well when you’re in here, Thor, you know where her feet have been.”

“Yeah, I know. I will,” Thor said. “I think I’m probably immune to her filth at this point, though.”

After he’d dried off, Loki leaned forward and peered into the mirror. He gave his tattoo an experimental brush with his fingertip.

“That lasted better than I thought it would,” Thor noted, watching him.

“Probably helps that I can barely move my face.”

Loki saw the scar in Thor’s side. Just a little white line, smooth and new, but cattier than all the holes from Ghost’s claws. Thor caught him looking and smiled with sympathy Loki didn’t feel worthy of.

“It didn’t hurt,” Thor soothed. “These sting like a bitch, though,” he grumbled, inclining his head to indicate Ghost’s piercings. “And they’ll be worse when the water hits them.” He darted over to steal a kiss from Loki’s lips before he stepped into the shower.

Loki waited under the blankets in the middle of the bed, warming the mattress and watching the Christmas lights. The stillness of the room felt sturdy to his eyes in a way that darkness never did. Anything could be happening in a dark room, you just didn’t know it. Stillness in a well-lit space was something different. Solid. Consistent. The colors would be the same until sunrise. The walls would somehow be pinned in place by their ability to be seen. By the availability of evidence--caught in their stability, familiar after every blink.

Loki heard Thor’s footsteps coming down the stairs then moving across the floor toward the front of the house. When he looked, Thor was peeking out through the curtains.

“Any of them still lit?” Loki asked.

“About half.”

“Anything else on fire?”

“Not yet,” Thor said, and knocked on the window frame.

He scurried over to slip under the covers and Loki scooted back a bit to offer up the warm spot he’d made. Thor hummed against Loki’s lips to say his thank you.

“You’re really only two miles away?” Loki asked, and felt his eyebrow rising up over his right eye, wrinkling his tattoo.

“I can jog it in fifteen minutes,” Thor smiled.

“How’d you get my address? I told Mom not to tell you.”

“Yeah, I know--fuck you very much for that, by the way--I asked Dad to get it for me, dipshit.”

Loki snorted and shook with laughter. When he’d calmed, he reached up to stroke Thor’s double chin while he asked him every question his sleepy brain could think of.

 

**Author's Note:**

> please don't repost or comment.


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